31/31 Day 10100: Being The Newcomer

While I'm old enough to have grown up with a Nintendo 64 and Game Boy Color, and my age is a bit wrong concerning the time I've actually played games. Like I've discussed many times before, I have dubbed myself a "young" gamer. not because I'm 17, but because I started gaming in my life as a real passion and obsession long after many others did. I didn't own a home console till I was 11, and also thought for awhile that Captain Falcon and Falco were from the same game, because I thought Captain Falcon said "Falco, punch!"...so yeah, I was stupid for a bit...okay, still am. :P

Pretend this is me. Okay, don't, I'm not this awesome.

Being this sort of person has caused me a lot of grief, as a gamer. It means I've missed out on seeing the real growth towards realism and sharper graphics: it means I missed titles in their original releases, and had to go back to visit them, with which I received less of an impact to compared to others who saw the game for the first time, and had no internet spoilers or anything. While I think I've come a long way in these past few years, playing and becoming familiar with a wide range of titles, I do still feel the sting of this person at times. For example...I've never held an SNES or NES controller.

For today, I thought I'd just talk about how I got introduced to some of my favorite series, considering most are more cult classic games, and how being this person has affected my time with friends and stuff. Considering I've said it in multiple blogs, I'll just simply state that the jump off point for me was Twilight Princess, in 2007, and that's when I really started to explore the gaming medium. However, I have a confession to make-before that point, I didn't know anything of The Legend of Zelda...and...I thought Link was Zelda. Please don't kill me guys. :P

Anyway, that was the time in my life where I started to really go towards Nintendo's games, and had my biggest exposure to them, with the Wii and DS. I played a lot of Pokemon titles, Zelda, Mario Kart, Smash Bros, and other titles. At this point, while I did love story in video games, it wasn't as important as it is to me today, considering I usually played with others, and played little-to-no RPGs, save, again, Pokemon. I also dabbled in some licensed games at the time, and for awhile, that was my thing, playing more multiplayer games, and sticking below the "M" rating. Then, I moved.

The first exposure.

After moving to my current location, I met someone who's now pretty much my best friend, and we talked about the games we both liked. Keep in mind, this is about early 2009, I think. So, well, I had the manga's for the Zelda series, and was showing them to him, because he liked Zelda, but never really played it, and he showed me the manga for a game that changed everything: Kingdom Hearts. At first, I thought it looked stupid. Boy, was I wrong. After a little prodding, I finally accepted his recommendation to try them out, and I read them. He only had ones for Kingdom Hearts 1 and Chain of Memories, so I just read those at the time, and I was sucked in. The intriguing characters and unique plot devices like the KeyBlade got to me, and eventually, after seeing the Nintendo Power cover for 358/2 Days, I decided to try the series.

Remember when swine flu was a big deal? Well, I got it then, and was out of school for a week. I had just rented 358/2 Days a couple weeks before, and kept it all that week. I loved the game so much, I kept playing it, and cried at the game's ending, because I'd looked up the stories of the other games, considering the manga's inaccuracy at points. Still, I carries on with the series, and played the PlayStation 2 installments, and got the new portable titles as they came out.

Not as late, getting in, but still late.

That same year, in 2009, I also discovered the Professor Layton series. I asked for the first title, Curious Village, for my birthday, and received the title, and loved it enough to get Diabolical Box when it came out a few months later. Here, we start to see my real love for story-based games. A few months after that, I also started seeing a trailer for a little game called Ace Attorney Investigations: Miles Edgeworth. I believe that Winter Break I went on vacation, and, being the spoiled kid I am, asked to order a copy of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney, to try the series out, and I got my wish. Oh man...that was the start of an obsession.

In the following months, I got and played through every Ace Attorney game, and I also continued to play the Professor Layton series when the games came out, and both became reasons I really loved my Nintendo DS. Both of the stories in the different series made me really start to appreciate them, and I started to fall in love with characters more. This only continued when I got The World Ends with You for Nintendo DS at Christmas 2011.

There are Nine Hours left.

Closing off the Nintendo portion of this blog, for my last birthday, about a year ago now, I started becoming interested in 999: Nine Hours Nine Persons Nine Doors. I got the title for my birthday, and played it a lot more than I thought I would, and so, I decided to also get the next entry in the series, Virtue's Last Reward, when it came out a couple months later. Well...you guys know my love for that game. ;)

As for the other series I was exposed to-that came in 2011, when I asked to get a little title called Dead Space, and that was my first M rated game. I loved it a lot, and also played Dead Space 2 at release, immediately loving Isaac's insane yells and stomps. Following this, I started to use Steam, and was introduced to the Half-Life series, and played every single one, save the PS2 entry, Decay. I started to grow and expand my gaming library, playing more M rated titles, and also spending more time playing on my PC. I tried Fallout, LIMBO, Max Payne, and a variety of titles, and this all led to today, with me, I feel, being much more informed about the gaming industry, the various cultures within it, and about games themselves.

Going back finally to actually what this all means, it means,well, several things, actually. For example, most of my friends started gaming when they were younger than I, but when I met them, they were all 360 people, so I never really had anyone to talk about all the new titles I was playing, except my one best friend, and people on Flipnote Hatena. It wasn't a huge deal, but considering none of my friends know what Virtue's Last Reward is...it kinda makes me sad...

Also, being this person has actually made me feel guilty at times. I didn't play these favorite series of mine when they came out: I fell in love with them sometimes years after their original release, and while I know it shouldn't be a huge issue, it just, is to me at times, because I didn't get to see them evolve over time, and I'm left wondering if I really can love them as much as others. This goes in hand with the fact that I didn't play games when they were released, and I thus sometimes experienced more frustration with a title, since new improvements in that genre/series had been made over time, and playing a later installment made playing that game harder.

Well, I'm going to close this off here. Hope you guys enjoyed this little trip down memory lane for me, and I'll see you tomorrow...

Oh, and this meant I was exposed to memes late, and was constantly reminded things like this were old. ;(